Wearing down the defenders of the environment

Context

Most Americans don't know it but MAGA elite and bigoted, Christian nationalist theocrat Russell Vought is arguably the 2nd most powerful American today. He likes to fly under the radar. He once promised this to federal employees if Trump won the 2024 election: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work… We want their funding to be shut down… We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected… We want to put them in trauma”. 

It isn't just federal employees that authoritarian MAGA ideology needs to break. America's authoritarian MAGA wealth and power movement needs to neutralize the same kinds of pro-democracy and pro-rule of law opposition that all corrupt tyranny movements need to subdue. A prime target for MAGA's transfer of wealth and power from the public interest to allied special interests is the environment and its defenders. 

Some recent reporting indicates that active environmentalists are wearing down and weakening. MAGA is winning its pro-pollution war. The defenders start from a position of weakness, unlike (1) the huge, powerful corporations like Exxon-Mobil that profit from pollution, and (2) intense government hater ideology that falsely argues that unregulated free markets will solve our problems, while government regulation can only make them worse. Wealth and power are, as usual, at the heart of this political and social war. 

The WD4C program (working dogs for 

conservation) provides support dogs to try to

reduce mental distress among conservationists

From eco-grief to eco-depression

The defender's weaknesses: One source reports that the environmentalism movement never considered the mental well-being of working conservationists. Those jobs are characterized by low wages, exploitative practices such as endless volunteering or unpaid internships, job insecurity, low benefits and high expectations for work that are sometimes unrealistic. Not surprisingly in view of the intense hostility that Trump and powerful MAGA elites hold for environmentalism (and democracy generally), mental problems among environmental workers are becoming more common. 

A 2023 research paper found that about 28% of conservationists were experiencing moderate to severe distress. The distress includes paranoia, panic attacks, depression, and suicide. Ecologic anxiety and climate distress foment adverse psychological and emotional responses to the dark future that climate change can lead to. 

Reasons for mental breakdown are obvious in the data. A World Wildlife Federation study found that global wildlife populations fell by 73% from 1970 to 2020. That is a staggering, shocking loss. Other research found that ~90% of global fisheries are either maxed out or overfished. Fisheries failure is one facet of ocean health decline. And there is the always denied, distorted or otherwise MAGA-spun reality that the world has heated up almost 1.5ᵒ C (2.7ᵒ F) in less than 200 years. The MAGA-denied impacts are pile up and there is no end in sight.

Being human, a growing belief among conservationists is that current evidence of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss is at a point where many activists no longer believe that we can recover anymore. Conservationists are feeling grief and loss very acutely not only because they directly experience it constantly. 

MAGA's intense hostility 

Conservationists are also aware of the ferocious hostility and hate of them and environmentalism that flows every day from Trump, MAGA elites and the pro-pollution sector of the US economy. For example, on Jan. 22, 2026 at a White House event, Trump mocked climate advocates as "environmental insurrectionists", accusing them of using bad weather to push a climate scam and job‑killing regulations. In Sept. of 2025, at Trump’s UN General Assembly address, he blamed radicalized environmentalists for trying to shut down factories and hurting the economy. MAGA makes it crystal clear where MAGA stands on the issue of environmentalism -- it is just a hoax.

Idaho Fish and Wildlife Office biologists hike at sunrise 

surveying greater sage-grouse in Owyhee County Idaho

People who aren't conservationists relate to the natural world and its beauty many different ways. A non-paywalled NYT opinion, The Badlands Hold Me as I Grieve, links one woman's grief with nature's beauty: "I have a kind of game I play with grief, imagining the birds I see are the people I’ve lost." She took this night picture of a hoot owl in her back yard in South Dakota:

 Personally, I mourn the avoidable loss of species and natural beauty that global warming caused. I see it here in the mountains in San Diego county. I feel some of the grief and mental distress. I know that Trump and MAGA are going to cause a lot more damage and continue to tell us it's just a hoax or something else ludicrous. Much of MAGA's damage will be either irreversible or very hard to reverse.